The more she felt her reserves of earthen monads running out, the more waste-product found its way to her head, drawn to the tremendous arcane bleed off that had naturally formed into an antler-like shape. The left became iron, and the right bronze.

A single moment had been stretched out into an eternity by the incomprehensible current surging through her being, and in a sudden moment, it was gone, yet left behind a blazing-white feeling that easily compared to what she had felt back then, at that cabin. Only… It was different, now. It didn’t threaten to burn her to a carbonized ember from the inside-out, merely seething inside, poised to lash out like a trained dog. Her muscles were wound as tightly as the spring of a great clockwork mechanism, bulging under her skin and drawing harsh lines on it, much of her subdermal fat gone and spent.

NEWMAN SECT FOUNDER

WILLOWDALE SLAYER’S GUILD PRIME SLAYER

TACTICAL SUPREMACY ASSET

AVATAR OF THE LIVING STORM

AWAKENED UNHOLY ONE, THE USURPER, UNCHAINED

ZELSYS NEWMAN, THUNDERING ENGINE BEAST

The lightning enveloping her was no shining armour as she had envisioned within the dream-desert, for it was entirely within, shining from inside her chest and lighting up the myriad silver conduits under her skin, showing itself only as a lightning-arc that slithered down her right arm to the Butcher. So stable was this arc that it resembled a real, living serpent in its undulations. Her hair whipped about, simultaneously bunched into thick dreadlock-like bundles and stirred into frenzy by the contradictory polarities affecting each bundle, the tremendous amount of Fulgur and Aether that bled off through it creating the false image of some antediluvian leviathan’s many tendrils. Screaming and shining in her hand, the Lightning Butcher had cracked down the middle, splitting the blade into two jaw-like parts.

Her perception of time had been stretched so far that when the Fulguric Flood had ceased, Zel’s subjective time snapped back like a rubber band. She was pained, surrounded by molten rock, and wracked by terrible hunger. Her heart was beating over six-hundred times a minute, her breathing faster than the cyclic rates of many engines, her cognition still rushing at nearly five seconds of subjective time to a normal fighting-man’s one and a half. As her sight returned to her, she saw Ubul - standing there right next to several dead warriors, stone-still, shielded by a chunk of thoroughly mundane rock, his hand grasping three stormward talismans.. So that was how he had vanished from the stormgods’ sight. She was no stormgod, and could not be fooled so easily.

For a moment, however, there was something akin to peace. It could not be called silence, between the grandiose music that carried across the field announcing Strake’ approach, to the continuous resonance of the Butcher’s broken blade, best compared to a gigantic tuning fork. Then, raindrops fell upon the field. That which was left of the Living Storm was no more than an immense accumulation of Aqua - rainclouds by any other name.

It barely took a thought for Zelsys to make hundreds of lightning-beads pop into being from the charged, conductor-rich atmosphere surrounding her. Raindrops turned to lightning-spheres before they could strike her, each in turn lashing out at Ubul and the space around him, already leading for a dodge he himself didn’t know he would make the next moment.

Without so much as raising a finger or taking a single step, Zelsys ripped Ubul to pieces, again and again, a million fireflies zipping through the air as the great general fled for his dear life, raising a castle’s worth in pillars and boulders to protect himself, the pursuing lightning-beads perfectly circumventing them each and every time as Zelsys observed. It was a circus of lights, a display of precision and destruction, Ubul’s stonebound form whittled away and shattered as he did all in his power to flee, and failing that, protect himself. For all the damage he sustained, there was one thing that could not be taken from the general: He was tenacious. When at last he realized there was no way to flee from this, he took a stand, used one arm to continuously raise and reinforce defenses, while, with his right, he shot right back, summoning up a deluge of hardened, sharpened stones that Zelsys had no chance of dodging either.

The beast-slayer made no attempt to do such a thing.

She exhaled long and hard, and formed a screen in front of herself. The stones struck it, stopped dead, and fell to the ground, piling up to waist-height before Ubul had the good judgment to stop his assault. In the swirling silver grayness of the fog-screen Zelsys saw a bestial, skull-masked, primordial image of herself, the Primordial Self’s eyes glowing like a wild animal’s from behind the mask. Her reflection blinked back at her, and she thought: “Us?”

A guttural growl in her own voice sounded from everywhere and nowhere at once, echoing inside her skull: “Us.”

With a single step forward, she threw herself through the already-dissipating veil of Fog, burning a substantial portion of the kinetic energy she’d stolen from Ubul. The burst of speed barely outstripped the terrible velocity she generated from her own footfalls, zigzagging so rapidly and chaotically that the general had no hope of reading her movements.

A little over a hundred meters away, Zefaris had hid within a trench for the duration of the terrible lightning-flood, and even got shocked a few times as the deluge of Fulgur that entered the earth spread out. They were only minor static discharges, true, but more than enough to illustrate the magnitude of whatever was going on. She had heard the scream preceding the deluge of light and noise. Before she could pop her head above the edge, she felt an alert thrum from her Tablet and a message flickered through her mind’s eye.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

Without thinking Zefaris jumped out of the trench, her gaze instinctively drawn in the direction of the message’s origin. She could scarcely keep up with what she was seeing.